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Hello, in his old age, Michael Sherbrooke wrote about the momentous event of his youth, the dissolution of the monasteries.

He wrote, all things of price were either spoiled, plucked away or defaced to the uttermost.

It seemed that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could. Nothing was spared but the ox houses and swine coats.

He was talking about the dissolution of Rochabby, but it could have been Lewis or Fountains, Glastonbury, Tinton or Walsinger.

Names that haunt the religious past as their ruins haunt the landscape. To many, that pleasing and gentle word dissolution meant destruction and ruin.

Hundreds of monasteries and nunneries were shockingly looted and pillaged during the reign of Henry VIII, but it was the destruction of monastic culture in this country,

was it an overdue religious reform or the grandest of lassness. And did he change the social fabric of England and Wales, Walsen for all?

We'd me to discuss the dissolution of the monasteries, Ardaianne Perkes, fellow and tutor at Kebel College Oxford.

George Bernard, professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton, and Dermod McCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford University.

Dermod McCulloch, when we talk about the monasteries, we tend to think of lonely ruined buildings, but can you give us a sense of the extent of the monastic network in England and Wales in 1530s?

Well, it's about 800 different institutions and an extraordinary variety of community sort of consumer choice there.

You've got Benedictine House's monasteries of various order cistercians, pre-monster-attentions, you could go on naming them.

Nunneries, colleges of priests there to pray for souls, but also friars and big distinction between monks and friars, monks are solitaries in enclosed communities,

friars are out in the world, they're ministering to the general public.

So you're talking about 800, are we talking about reaching into every, or now called town, city, village in the country?

Oh yes, you'd be within half an hour's walk of the monastery, virtually anywhere in England, perhaps an hour's walk in Wales.

And what was the function of the monastery in the community, well come back as it were to God in a moment, but generally in the community?

Well, I don't think we should leave God out from the start, because this is about prayer, and prayer is a practical function for the medieval world.

They're there to pray, pray for the souls of the founders in the case of the great monasteries, but pray for everybody in their search to get through purgatory after death towards heaven.

That's what the function of monasteries and friars really is, and for friars in particular, that's a public function.

They're there to celebrate masses for the ordinary people, they're out in the world, they pray, but they also preach.

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